Wikileaks Promises Text Messages: Corpus Linguistics Motherlode?
Holy crap. Wikileaks is said to be releasing more than HALF A MILLION intercepted "pager messages" from the days following 9/11/2001. This could be huge -- or a complete boondoggle, depending on how it is organized. Now, apart from the ginormous question of who is intercepting and archiving private text messages...
Corpus linguistics is a branch of applied linguistics that analyzes huge volumes of language looking for patterns. People who do corpus linguistics use "concordancers" or software that can quickly search for words and strings of words and display the context in which they are used. I would LOVE to get my hands on texts from the New York and DC areas for the day of the attack -- I wouldn't expect any kind of orgasmic denouement ("Ari, our controlled demolition of the towers went perfectly -- please let the peeps in Herzliya know. Love, Schmueli") but as with the oral histories of the firefighters, there could be reports of explosions and other "anomalous" events.
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and it could be a hoax
a trojan horse full of things like "Mohammed and Allah be praised, we have brought Jihad to the great satan's shores!" just in time to influence public opinion on the bogus KSM trial... File this under too something to be true...
Eh... possibly.
We'll see. They seem to be having trouble managing what they figure will be major demand for the data.
Wikileaks publishes September 11 pager messages
9/11 tragedy pager intercepts.
http://911.wikileaks.org/
From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks is releasing over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
The messages are being broadcast "live" to the global community — sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.
Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center
The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.
An index of messages released so far is available here.
http://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html
questions on these alleged pager messages
Who collected them, and how is that legal? How do we know they're authentic? I've seen no answers to the question of their authenticity and given the significance of their contents IF AND ONLY IF they are authentic, I would say that's a pretty huge red flag, with big letters saying CAREFUL: POSSIBLE HOAX. Mining a body of content like this without having any idea of its authenticity may be a lot of fun, and tantalizing to people like us starved for truth about the events, but please, people--common sense!
Lets see what the game play
Lets see what the game play is on this one.
messages are now available:
http://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html
one interesting comment after two minutes of searching
09-11 23:09:33 Skytel [003896350] D ALPHA 2 men just arrested in the Meadowlands with a truck full of explosives headed for the GWB...And you wonder why I am nervous???
i wonder about these texts
that particular item was reported on the news, no? do these texts have any potential? i skimmed through the comments and don't suspect they will prove very useful. are we actually expecting that the perpetrators were sending congratulatory text messages? or just hoping for eyewitness reports relayed via text? I think sifting through news archives or interviewing eyewitnesses in NYC (CIT style) would be more useful.
Ewwww...
was my first response to this list of keywords that Jon Gold is using to search the message archive:
"Atta, hijack, norad, military, plane, laden, binladen, bin laden, bush, cheney, rumsfeld, myers, clarke, rice, mineta, secret service, sheikh, iraq, pakistan, israel, saudi, saudi arabia, denial, deny, sheikh, terror, attack, exercise, protocol, intercept, bomb, explosion"
He forgot pork chop...
here's a wikileaks conspiracy theory for y' all
http://www.911blogger.com/node/22013
Apparently Congress is angry at wikileaks, whoever they are, for releasing all those pager messages. Now I wonder... Are these messages fake, intended to feed us disinfo? That was my first thought when this story broke. But another possibility is that wikileaks is in fact working for say, Mossad, and this stunt is a way of letting certain people know the kind of access they have to what were presumed to be confidential communications, a la the tapping of Bill Clinton's phone chats with Monica. What think ye?
sounds good to me
"hey everybody, the evidence for 9/11 complicity might be buried in this haystack and we're just the anonymous altruistic bunch to bring that haystack to you!"
but it's all a mirage, nothing anyone could possibly find in there is worth much of anything, imho
so why release it to begin with? like you say, show offs.